Major metropolitan cities produce a mind-boggling amount of civic data on a daily basis. But disenfranchised communities and the social organizations who serve them lack the resources to delve into this deluge of data. New York-based non-profit DataKind (formerly Data Without Borders) aims to address this skill and resource gap, connecting volunteer data scientists and developers with social organizations lacking the money, time, or the skills necessary to better serve their communities and address social ills through data analysis.

As DataKind founder Jake Porway stated at Code for America’s second Big Data for the Public Good seminar, (which I recapped for event sponsor Greenplum,) open data without skilled analytics is “like giving crude oil to people…Open data is not useable data.” This philosophy is key to DataKind’s mission and informed its first Chicago DataDive last weekend, which connected volunteers from Chicago’s emerging open data community with local non-profit organizations for 22 hours of hacking, research, and analysis.

DataKind connects researchers with social organizations through three programs: the DataFellows fellowship, which assigns data scientists to work with a particular organization, DataCorps, a distributed network of volunteers, and city-specific weekend DataDives. The Chicago DataDive is the fourth the non-profit has organized since its kickoff in New York City on October 14, 2011, which demonstrated a correlation between “stop-and-frisk” incidents reported by the NYC police and racial profiling, on behalf of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Big Data for the Public Good | Seminar 2: Data Without Borders | Jake Porway from Code for America.

For the Chicago event, DataKind partnered with the American Red Cross of Greater Chicago, Children’s Memorial Hospital, and Enlace Chicago, an organization aiming to reduce violence and encourage educational advancement and economic development in the city’s Little Village neighborhood. Each organization provided internal data as well as representatives to collaborate with volunteer data ambassadors and attendees. The goal? To identify internal operational challenges and explore how deep, dedicated data analysis by trained professionals could help the non-profits better serve their communities.

Big Shoulders, Narrow Scope

Jake Porway speaks to the Enlace working group.

DataKind chose Chicago as the location for its fourth DataDive based on the high level of interest expressed by the “city’s amazing data and tech scene” said Porway, and the open data initiatives championed by City of Chicago data gurus Brett Goldstein and John Tolva. To ensure the events yield useful results, DataKind is equally selective when choosing partner social organizations. The problem an organization wants to tackle “has to be narrowly scoped,” said Porway. “We know we’re not going to solve an endemic problem in a weekend.”

DataKind vets the data, so that attendees don’t spend an entire weekend hacking the data into a useable state. “Anyone who knows data knows that data cleaning is a big problem,” he said, acknowledging that some degree of data cleanup is inevitable at this stage. They also look for “buy-in from someone at the ground level and the ‘c level’” to gauge the level of engagement and commitment within the organization.

Following a debriefing and cocktail mixer Friday evening, the 70 attendees met at startup incubator 1871 Saturday morning to break into three working groups. Representatives from each non-profit articulated the problems they hoped to address over the weekend, while the data ambassador served as facilitator and translator. The questions each organization presented, detailed on the event wiki, were narrowly focused given the limited time and available data.

The Chicago Red Cross’s question was strategic: where should the organization allocate resources to prevent disasters? “The kind of organization that we are, serving in a lot of different capacities — we respond to disasters, provide health and safety information, collect blood, provide tracking services on an international basis — creates a tremendous amount of data,” said Benjamin R. Kessler, Manager of Database Operations for the Chicago Red Cross. “Keeping track of that data is an ongoing problem, and we certainly do not have a comprehensive handle on it. The fact that the DataDive was happening was coincident with the fact that I was asked by the organization to look for better ways of organizing our disaster response data, so it was a nice hand-in-glove coincidence.”

Benjamin R. Kessler speaks to the Red Cross working group.

Children’s Memorial Hospital aimed to identify the who, what, and where of youth violence in Chicago, and how geographic data could be used to track the risks and assets within a particular community. Enlace’s team looked at whether they could find correlations between school performance and nearby crimes, and track crime spikes over time. For 14 hours on a sunny spring Saturday in downtown Chicago, attendees brainstormed, discussed, and peered deep into a web of terminal windows.

Spending a free weekend cleaning datasets and building frameworks for further analysis isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. So “what motivates people to spend their weekend staring at rows of data?” asked Young-Jin Kim, Managing Director for Drupal developer Emphanos. “It’s a puzzle, and data geeks don’t get an opportunity that often to dig into other people’s data,” he said. “It’s usually private. What interested me here is finding out what other people use. There’s new tools being developed all the time and you can’t keep up. I’m a strong believer in tool building in general. That’s what got us out of the caves and into buildings like this. Sharing these tools is how we got here.”

Tools for Social Change

12 hours in, the DataDive was still going.

Developing these tools is fundamental to Datakind’s goal to kickstart ongoing projects. The research and visualizations produced during the weekend serve primarily as useful proofs of concept, demonstrating to the organizations what can be done with data, and what new insights and questions emerge. Porway emphasized to attendees that their efforts were foundational: providing organizations with a framework to work with data, while connecting them with potential volunteer developers and researchers.

“One of the challenges is that it’s just a day,” said data ambassador Mike Stringer, Managing Partner at Datascope Analytics and organizer of the Data Science Chicago meetup. “I like that Jake is emphasizing the longer-term vision, and trying to look toward how we can be useful to these types of organizations in the future. The central challenge today is just getting a handle on the data, figuring out the format of it, what’s in there — it just takes time and every person has to struggle with it individually and try to get their head around what’s actually in there. That takes half of the day, and so you only have the other half of the day when you have some idea of what’s in there, and that’s just not much time. You’re not going to solve the problem of crime in Chicago with a half day of hacking.”

The Enlace team deep in data.

Ultimately, it’s about building sustainable relationships that will address real ongoing problems. DataKind collaborates with the organizations before the DataDives to ensure that the project is worth their time, and that attendees will be able to hit the ground running. Since DataKind is “cultivating on the front-end, everybody is up to speed and comes to the table to have an effective conversation,” said Kate Eyler-Werve, a local change management consultant currently writing a book about building community around public data for O’Reilly Media. “That’s very difficult to do, and the fact that they’re doing it with only three groups at a time is significant.”

“Let’s face it,” said Eyler-Werve, with characteristic Chicago candor. “Non-profits are pressed for time, they don’t necessary have somebody who is willing to sit here and listen to some yahoo who may or may not be helpful. What I’ve found is that there’s already this pretty high level of distrust and animosity between the development community and the not-for-profit community. I was at an Idea Hack a couple weeks ago, and the developers said, ‘I just want to be able to come in and devote one hour to something that would be useful.’ The non-profit people were like, ‘yeah, you’re going to build us some BS website that only you know how to build and it’s going to break and we’re going to be worse off than before, so I’m going to dump all my time into this.’”

“It was a completely unproductive conversation, and it was the wrong conversation to have,” she said. “You’re talking about infrastructure and websites instead of talking about data and what you can do with that, so trying to shift that conversation is a challenge and I think the DataDive is doing a fine job.”

Bad Data, Due Diligence, and the Trouble With Crime Maps

Jake Porway addresses the attendees Saturday afternoon.

Producing useful frameworks and a community to continue the work is essential. DataDive attendees are ultimately limited by the data sets available during the short window of time allotted. Effective analysis of the many factors contributing to social ills demands significant time and an ongoing effort.

Simple visualizations that fail to account for the breadth of relevant factors can be more than merely misleading. They can actively harm communities they aim to serve, a concern shared by a number of attendees. This is a central issue for those working with crime data — simplistic heat maps of crime incidents that lack demographic and socioeconomic data are not only ineffective, but can exacerbate existing prejudices.

“There needs to be more due diligence with regard to crime mapping,” said Marshall Smith, a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “The challenge is having the right sets of data for the right kinds of questions,” he said. “We need to have a very thorough understanding of what questions come out of the data.”

Such sentiments were echoed on Sunday morning by Tzyy-Chyn Hu, Director of Clinical Research for the Cook County Bureau of Health Services. “No data is better than wrong data,” she said. “These organizations depend on this data for funding. When decision making is made from the wrong data, it’s a disaster,” she said, emphasizing the wide range of factors — socioeconomic factors, location, race, policy, even weather — that contribute to crime rates. “Multivariate analysis is essential,” she said. "You need some kind of reliable measurement and to bring in all the possible factors…Data is just numbers. You get wisdom from your interpretation.”

Sustaining the Buzz

The results of the weekend’s labor, presented by each Data Ambassador on Sunday morning, represented only a beginning — products of an all-too-brief dip into the available data. Nevertheless, the presentations posed compelling questions, which are documented in depth on the wiki. The Red Cross team found that fires are often clustered in certain neighborhoods, providing insight on where the organization could more effectively allocate fire prevention efforts. They found a strong correlation between disaster responses and per capita income, race, and population, though not population density. They also mapped the disaster response data, demonstrating to the organization how free and relatively user-friendly tools like Google Fusion Tables offer valuable insight.

The Enlace team focused more gathering public school data, identifying trends in Little Village crime data, and establishing research approaches. The team working with Children’s Memorial Hospital focused on translating the data for further analysis and creating a set of tools and processes for the organization, including a process for adding community area, neighborhood, and census tracts to 2011 Chicago crime data, and a Python script for geocoding addresses in the randomized Illinois Violent Death Reporting System data.

For their part, representatives from the organizers left the DataDive on Sunday afternoon satisfied that their time and resources were well-spent, and that they were leaving with effective tools for continued research. “I don’t normally realize that we’re as silo’d as we are, so it was nice to build a broader set of contexts and see that the same problems we deal with are dealt with in a lot of different areas,” said Jennifer Cartland, Director at the hospital’s Child Health Data Lab. “There’s a different skill set here than what we have in our office. We have a lot of in-house tools that allow us to do statistical analysis and work with data, but we don’t have the skills to put together what would be a living resource on the Internet. It got our thinking a lot further along in terms of what we need. We have a much more concrete idea of what our end game is.”

Rebecca Levin, Strategic Director at the Injury Prevention and Research Center, explained that the event helped establish new strategies for working with data from organizations participating in the hospital’s Strengthening Chicago’s Youth (SCY) program. “We’re really excited about applying this idea within the SCY collaborative” she said, “for our member organizations to bring their data so we could match them up with local data scientists who can help them look at the data and what they could do with that.” Levin expressed strong desire “to take the tools developed this weekend and help other groups in Chicago look at the picture in their communities.”

This energy was shared by attendees. Members of the Red Cross team formed an ongoing Data Pot Luck — a regular meetup for “data diving and good food” — to continue the work and momentum from the DataDive. Dean Malmgren, Managing Director at Datascope Analytics, created a Chicago Data Meetups stack on Delicious as a resource for the emerging community.

Mike Stringer presents the Red Cross team's work and conclusions.

Such examples bode well for future of what Neal Gorenflo dubbed the “data-driven civil society.” But facilitating the level of ongoing engagement necessary to effect lasting social change is a challenge facing all organizers of civic hackathons, requiring a shift in both behavior and culture.

“How do you get people to change their behaviors so that a one-time intervention can actually bear fruit over the long term?” asked Eyler-Werve. “One-time interventions are great — they develop a lot of buzz, get some new ideas going, some new energy — and that’s fantastic. Even if that’s all that it does, I think that’s still useful, because we’re still getting people to think differently.”

Though the participants in the DataDive were enthusiastic to connect with their communities and eager to keep momentum going, the data science resource gap shared by many social organizations won’t be solved with soda and beer-fueled weekend hacking marathons alone. “We do need to think about how to sustain the engagement, and I don’t think that asking the developers to devote all their weekends to this is the right answer,” Eyler-Werve said. “I think non-profits and also foundations need to figure out, ‘this is something valuable, this is something we should fund, so let’s push this forward.’ That’s going to be pretty integral to the sustainability of this.”

Concept cars represent the auto industry's best attempt to peer into the future. They feature cutting-edge technologies and stunning shapes, but they're usually years, if not decades away from reality.

Still, it may be the process used to imagine these cars, rather than their actual design, that provides the best clues about the future of the transportation industry.

Last year, Volkswagen launched something called "The People's Car Project" for members of its Chinese market. The idea was to crowdsource ideas for future car innovation via a virtual suggestion box on the project's website, and then turn them into reality through a series of online videos.

People in China loved the idea. Nearly 12 months later, the project has inspired 33 million website visitors and the submission of 119,000 unique ideas for possible automotive products and technologies. Volkswagen developed concept cars around its three favorite ideas and is displayed them at the Beijing Motor Show. Not surprisingly, a flying car was near the top of the list:

The other top entries were the Music Car, which changes its color based on the driver’s music choices, and the Smart Key, a smart phone that can also start a car and monitor important functions. 

Aside from fulfilling all of our Back to the Future fantasies, these cars, and the project that spawned them, can teach us a powerful lesson about the future of virtually every industry on the planet. 

No longer will companies be content (or able) to simply forcefeed the public what it deems the next best thing. In fact, the roles may reverse completely, with manufacturers depending on market feedback before deciding what it will make or how it will market it. Companies will be forced to design smarter products, because the people that request them are searching for smarter solutions.

"The ‘People's Car Project' in China marks the beginning of a new era in automobile design," Luca de Meo, Director of Marketing, Volkswagen Group said. "We are no longer just building cars for, but also with customers and at the same time initiating a national dialog which gives us a deep insight into the design preferences, needs and requirements of Chinese customers."

Although we've seen crowdsourcing applied to creative and philanthropic efforts in a variety of different ways, Volkswagen's strategy seems to imply that soon these "altruistic" tactics could be put to use in the for-profit world as well. Instead of simply crowdsourcing ideas for neighborhood improvement or funds for a social justice campaign, we may soon see corporations looking to the crowd for ideas about prefered product development, including material sourcing, packaging design, or delivery options.

In this way, consumers will be able to go far beyond voting with their dollars by sharing concerns about sustainability efforts, pollution, waste, cost, and product features directly with the manufacturers. By looking to their audience for guidance before production rather than after, companies can become more efficient, not wasting time on products that the public doesn't want or need, as well as more transparent, and able to react quickly to consumer questions and requests.

What product or service would you suggest if your favorite brand was looking for suggestions? Share your ideas in a comment!

All this week you can win a copy of Share or Die,  the new book from Shareable. In the book, young people tell the story of a new lifestyle based on sharing instead of shopping. New Society Publishers is giving away a copy every day this week as part of their "Book a Day for the Month of May".

Visit New Society for instructions on how to get a chance to win.

UPDATE 5/16/2012: Make sure to follow the instructions by including the #bookaday hashtag, otherwise New Society Publishers will not be able to track your tweet.

While the current narrative of the American economy is far from hopeful, cooperatives are setting a more uplifting tone. According to the National Cooperative Business Association in Washington, D.C., 29,000 cooperatives operate in the nation’s economy, and these democratically governed businesses generate two million jobs each year.

The group’s interim president and chief executive officer, Liz Bailey, steered a delegation of 150 leaders and advocates of cooperatives to the White House on May 4th to spark a dialogue with federal officials about the critical role that cooperatives play in job creation and economic development, and how that role could be expanded to revive economically depressed areas and the middle class.

Bailey said there were representatives from various sectors of the coop economy including food, agricultural, finance, housing and health care, adding that the wide representation was to “give a real flavor of how vast the cooperative model is being used in the economy." Policy makers at all levels of government are generally unaware of the huge scope, power, and promise of the cooperative model at a time when proven economic solutions are needed most. 

Liz Bailey speaks at the White House. Photo courtesy: Liz Bailey, National Cooperative Business Association

I talked to Bailey recently about some of the key issues addressed by the nation’s cooperative leaders and White House officials at the meeting. Following are excerpts from our conversation:

You recently led a delegation of cooperative leaders to Washington D.C. to participate in the White House Community Leaders Briefing Series. What ideas did you and the other leaders bring to the discussion table?

We had the opportunity to both hear from the White House about some of their issues, so it was a dialogue where first they gave us some of their key issues in terms of the economy and jobs. Then we talked to them about four key focal areas … One, cooperatives are a way to help grow the middle class. It really provides individuals with access to affordable housing, fair lending practices, livable wage jobs and all of those kinds of things that allow people to really survive and grow within the middle class, where they feel they have more money to use for other things and disposable income.

Another thing that we were pointing out to them was how cooperatives really provide consumers with more choices and access to essential services. … The third point we were making was that cooperatives can grow sustainable small businesses — that you take that individual entrepreneur and you make them a member of a purchasing or shared services cooperative, and they then have that ability to get the price advantage. They get the backroom support. They get everything that the purchasing cooperative can do for them that by themselves, they would have to front all those costs and compete with the big-box stores, but also just compete in a down economy.

Then the fourth point we were making was how cooperatives really help grow local economies and how they really give back value to the community. … And the fact that the business is a community-based business, so there aren’t investors in some distant location that are reaping the benefits. The dollars stay in the community with the member-ownership, and the fact that the business is sized and structured so that it serves the needs of that community.

What were some of the issues raised by the White House officials?

We had four breakout sessions, which is where we really got into more of the discussion of issues. One was agriculture, and we had senior people from the Department of Agriculture there who were really talking about the funding for cooperative development and the access to those kinds of grant and loan programs that are part of the USDA portfolio. There was a lot of concern about what’s happening in the current budget.

We also had a breakout session that was more on the consumer finance area. We had the treasurer of the United States moderating that group, and there they were really talking about the credit union lending issues. … We also had a breakout session on SBA lending practices, and there we had some concerns that cooperatives are not deemed eligible — not all of them — for SBA lending.

In particular, food coops are historically not allowed to qualify for SBA lending. Historically, they believe that a food coop is more like a buying coop and that there isn’t any value that is in the business itself that would be collateral for a loan. So there was a good deal of discussion about that, and how you break down some of that barrier and get the redefinition of what is a valid lending opportunity for a cooperative. We’ve been working on the Hill on that particular issue, too. I think we’re hopeful that this year we can really get some of that barriers to lending within that SBA system removed either through internal or through legislative interest.

The fourth breakout session was with the Domestic Policy Council staff. There, it was really kind of a sharing of information back and forth with looking at the whole domestic policy area and trying to gain some traction with them as to how coops are an additional tool that they can be looking to for a lot of economic development. There was also a fair amount of discussion from our group to them asking for more understanding — as they talk about small business that they add in cooperatives, so we would get more of that kind of visibility and traction for coops when we are somewhat invisible on that whole radar screen.

So basically what it did was, it laid the groundwork for a lot. Every time a question came up in either the small group or in the plenary sessions, the White House response was, in addition to talking about it, to volunteer that they wanted to continue to work with us. They suggested we work with them to set up regional meetings around the federal government to have listening sessions and town halls meetings with federal agency people around the country. We’re already starting to work on that.

What is unique about the cooperative business model that makes it conducive to generating secure and fair wage jobs?

I think that part of it is that it is so local and member-driven. It’s created for a purpose. With democratic governance, it has members' interest at the heart of the enterprise. It’s efficient because those who do the work are involved in deciding what to work on and how to work on it. You don’t have somebody at a distance making decisions about what the business is about. Members and workers control the enterprise democratically.

What are some channels of funding that are available for cooperative enterprises?

That’s one of the biggest challenges for coops, because to be a coop, your equity is from your members. You can’t have angel investors come in and own the business. At least 50 percent of the coop needs to be owned by its members. So the big problem for many coops is that the only money they’ve got for expansion, if they really want to grow the business in any substantial way or even start a coop, that member equity has to be your primary source of funding, so then finding other sources of funding is always a challenge.

There are some funds out there in the private sector, but most people want more of a return than what you can get from a coop startup or expansion, because you aren’t going to generate that same return as you would from investing in a traditional business where you’re doing it to make the money quickly. Money for cooperative development, the real technical assistance, boots-on-the-ground work — that is hard to come by.

One thing we’re hoping to learn from this work with the White House is finding where there are dollars for workforce development or the training of members of worker coops or the home care world or finding where rural health dollars could be available for coops as part of a rural health network.  

Are cooperatives better suited to weather fluctuations in the economy?

There’s research that indicates that difficult times are good time for coops because people are looking for how to make do with less. I've heard from some of the large food cooperatives, “we don’t let our member stores go under.” For one thing, they may have had a better business model in the first place by virtue of being a member of the purchasing cooperative, because they were able to get price breaks that came with that group buying power. But then they say, “It’s to our advantage to keep them viable, so we don’t let our stores go under unless we’ve tried everything, and it doesn’t work.” So that the coop, especially in that small business world, their approach is — we need to work this out, we need to make sure that we can all be whole at the end of the day.

Get your pedals turning – May is National Bike Month. Not only that, but this week is Bike to Work Week with Friday, May 18, singled out as Bike to Work Day for those who can't commit to the whole five-day spread. The League of America Bicyclists has listings for bike events happening all over the country this month, along with commuter data, bike maintenance information, and safety rules.

At Shareable, biking is a hot topic every month. Here are some of our best bike-related articles:

The Precariat's Guide to Biking Across Europe
Feeling adventurous in honor of National Bike Month? Take to the roads of Europe – or any other unknown land – with this helpful guide to bike trips. The subjects of the article road some 3,500 miles across five countries. Perhaps you'll want to start smaller.

Bicycling as a Way of Life
For many people, every month is bike month. The practice has become more than just a practical matter or a money-saver or a fitness option. It has, truly, become a way of life. To embrace biking in this way changes everything about you.

How to Be a Carfree Family
Because cars have become integral parts of our individual – and collective – existences, getting to the point of embracing biking as a way of life may or may not require baby steps, even if you don't have children. However, there are a lot of reasons to make the switch, even part-time.

The Boom in Biking Benefits Everyone, Not Just Bicyclists
In metropolitan areas the world over, biking has become something of an imperative because it solves numerous problems in one fell swoop. Traffic congestion ... check. Carbon emissions ... check. Parking problems ... check. Public health ... check. Economic issues ... check. It's all in there, and more.

Bicycling magazine's map of the top 50 biking cities.

The Most Bike-Friendly Cities
Many cities are recognizing all of that inherent goodness. At the head of the class stands Minneapolis, a surprising lead, no doubt, considering the climate. Nevertheless, Minneapolis continues to pursue ways of maintaining their standing with off-road bike trails, a bike-sharing program, nearly 200 miles of bikeways, a bike and foot bridge, and more.

How to Boost Biking and Walking Even Further in Your City
Because biking – and its natural companion, walking – are so multi-functional in urban centers, cities other than Minneapolis are doing everything they can to create infrastructure improvements and other resources that support and further the move toward these people-powered transportation options. Citizens, too, can help the process along.

How to Create a Bike Corridor
One specific way residents can speed bike-friendly policies along is to get involved with the planning of safe bike corridors in their city. That's what a group of folks have done in Los Angeles as a way to show municipal planners exactly what is possible and practical.

A protected bike lane on Dunsmuir St. in Vancouver shows the street of the  future.  Photo credit:  Photo by Paul Kruger. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Feds Vote To Defund Bike & Pedestrian Programs
All of this local activism is critical at this juncture in our collective bike-geared future because officials at the federal level have decided recently to pick a fight with cyclists and pedestrians by defunding programs which support these alternative transportation modalities. With all of the benefits known to be associated with biking and walking, the move makes no common sense.

Five Things Every Mayor Should Know Before Starting a Bike-Sharing Program
Still, the people have the power. And some of the people with the most power are mayors. Implementing bike-sharing programs in cities brings along all of the myriad goodness already mentioned as well as one more factor – tourism. Though boosts in visitors and their accompanying revenues are important to any city, bike-sharing programs aren't cheap so the potential for offsets is key.

Study: Bike Sharing Can Save Your Life
Above and beyond the financial savings that bike sharing can provide, the saving of lives can't be counted in dollars. A study of Barcelona's biking program suggests that 12 lives are spared annually due to a decrease in car accidents on the road.

So, hop on a bike this month for National Bike Month. And, then, keep the wheels spinning for the rest of the year!

It's not a stretch to say the tweet is a new poetic form, I would go so far as to say it's the dominant form of contemporary poetry. A writer can go from unknown to internet-famous with a handful of precisely chosen words. Fan communities can burst out of nowhere, creating poets out of robots or musing atheletes. But there's a structural problem: when poets sell books or get commissioned for readings, they (in theory) get material support in exchange for their work. In other words: even pro poets get paid. Tweeters, on the other hand, are making money for the blue bird alone. Twitter may be a compelling forum for poetry, but can it support its poets?

Perhaps no self-described poet has taken to the form as well as Patricia Lockwood. Though she's been published in some top-level mainstream outlets, Lockwood has received the most notice for her 140-character work. Her "sexts" drew the attention of the Huffington Post (not known for its poetry coverage), and HTML Giant called her the "Poet Laureate of Twitter." With over 10,000 unusually devoted followers reading her work every day (plus copious retweets), Lockwood might just be the most popular poet in the United States. But when crisis hit, it wasn't clear if she could turn that admiration into the support she needed.

Last week, Lockwood's husband was diagnosed with a rare form of cataracts and was going blind at 30. He would need a full lens replacement on both eyes, and fast. The cost: $10,000. Emergency medical expenses like this are a leading cause of bankruptcy in the US, and it's easy to see why: Who has 10 grand sitting around? Yesterday, Lockwood took to her blog with an appeal to her fans and a donate button:

"I posted about it on Twitter because I was basically losing my mind with worry and the outpouring of support was astonishing; people suggested that I do this so I am doing this because they wanted to help, which made me cry, and some quote about the color purple, if you walk past the color purple in a field and do not make it donate money to you so your husband can stop going blind, then you are being pretty mean to God.

(As I understand it.)"

The numbers make it sound easy, that's only a buck a follower! And people love her stuff! I sent $2 this morning, honestly more out of appreciation for her work than sympathy. But the conventional wisdom is that the sort of conversion of internet affection into cash, even for a good cause, is really difficult.

Well, the conventional wisdom should probably change:

The outpour was dramatic. Within 12 hours Lockwood had to shut down the button so as not to pull in more in donations than she asked for. This being Twitter, then came the jokes:

Of course I'm happy for Lockwood and her husband, but what interests me even more is the precedent this sets. How far are we from independent, reader-sponsored, professional tweeters? What if tweet-crews thought ahead and built emergency funds for situations like this one? Or even strike funds? We've just started exploring what's possible with this network beyond its code.

Many people consider the throes of May to be a great time to do their annual spring cleaning. This year, why not add a healthy dose of sharing to the mix? As you clean out your closets, prep your garden, and plan your summer activities, consider doing it all shareable-style. Here are Shareable.net's most helpful guides to doing just that:

Swappers show off their finds at Eat, Drink, and Be Mary. Photo credit: SharonaGott. Used under Creative Commons license.

How to Throw a Toy Exchange

Kids tire of toys almost as fast as they outgrow their shoes. By culling through and trading their play things with other families, you can extend the life of the toys you paid good money for while also harvesting a fresh batch of fun for your kids.

Hot tip: “It's easier to exchange without kids, but it's likely some children will be there, so have something for them to do elsewhere so their parents can "shop" more easily.”

How to Stage a Clothes Swap

Now that the kids' closets are taken care of, how about rummaging through your own and discarding all those clothes you haven't worn for six months or more? Encourage all of your stylish friends to do the same, plan a clothes swap, and, in the end, come away with a new wardrobe.

Hot tip: “Either establish a one-bag of discards to one-bag of discoveries policy or let people bring what they have and take what they like, with no maximum or minimum.”

Ingredients for a Successful Urban Kitchen Garden

If the local community garden is full up, but you have a patch of dirt and want to grow some food for yourself and your neighbors, then get to it! Even in the city, a little space can go a long way with proper planning and commitment.

Hot tip: “Growing food can require a good chunk of time and energy investment; it's always more fun and inspiring to dig in and work toward a common vision together. With very little money, a few friends, shared resources, and a potluck lunch, a kitchen garden can be born.”

Work gets underway at the Sunshine Castle garden. Photo credit: Kitchen Garden SF. Used with permission.

How to Start a Nature Group for City Kids

Keeping kids occupied during the summer months can be a challenging task. In urban centers, getting kids out into nature is an excellent way to keep their brains and bodies busy. It might even be fun for the parents, too.

Hot tip: “Choose your friends wisely: Maybe it seems backwards to pick the members of your group after forming the group, but there is good reason. Most likely you’ll start off with a core group of families ... 'New people keep the group fresh and make it about something more than just hanging out with friends,' says Jessica.”

How to Throw a Succesful Yard Sale

With a variety of things to get rid of, a yard sale is always a solid choice. In this day and age, though, there are a lot of extra technological tools at your disposal to make your sale stand head and shoulders above others in your neighborhood.

Hot tip: “Create a web presence: This step makes all the difference, but it doesn't need to be complicated! The easiest method is to create a Facebook event. It's quick to set up, and you can invite most of your friends and neighbors.”

How to Grow a Garden on Your Balcony

Some urban dwellers don't have a space where or even neighbors with whom they can plant a garden. They are left to their own creative devices when it comes to growing some food. Not to worry. Balcony gardening is all the rage!

Hot tip: “Don't worry about having the perfect place or the perfect time or the perfect whatever the excuse is. The only perfect thing is right now, so work with that and just do it. Another piece of advice that I'd give is to stick with it. You aren't going to be 100% successful. No one is. The most important thing is that you learn from your mistakes and continue to improve ... and have fun.”

How to Build a Better Block

In days gone by, hanging out on the front porch or outside the sidewalk cafe were the norm in urban neighborhoods. These days, many areas need a helping hand to become conducive to that sort of community-minded behavior.

Hot tip: “Remember that people want a reason to stay and be a part of the environment. Be sure to provide plenty of seating, things to read (maps, build simple kiosks to use as community boards, food/drink), chess boards, et cetera. Print out and post the story of the block (its history, its present, its future as a neighborhood place).”

How to Plant a Habitat Garden at the Local Playground

Another way to get kids outside and active is to cordone off a space at the local playground and plant a habitat garden. It combines fun and education with nature. And that's always a winning formula.

Hot tip: “Once you plant the garden, your circle of families is responsible for maintaining it...for the rest of its natural life. In some ways, committing to the year-round growth of the garden should be step one ... think first about your goals and long-range commitment to the project. A habitat garden is actually an excellent choice for this kind of activity.”

How to Share a Vegetable Garden

Following up on that point ... when entering into a sharing arrangement of any kind with neighbors or friends, plotting out expectations and exit strategies are very important. That rule – and others – holds true for the sharing of a vegetable garden, particularly because physical labor is involved. Whether you are on the side of the homeowner or the side of the neighbor, you'll want to talk through all of the possibilities.

Hot tip: “Many homeowners worry about liability when they invite others onto their property. That’s why it’s critical for you and your neighbor to discuss how you can reduce the risk that someone will be injured.”

"A paper can change the present if it allows people to see a new world at hand" says Natalia Fernández.

The paper she talks about is the core of a campaign and a blog post entitled "Against the Crisis: P2P Industrial Revolution!" which is being discussed right now across dozens of towns and communities around Spain and Portugal. Its English translation is also quickly spreading around the world.

Natalia is probably the best known member of Las Indias, a transnational community that organizes its economy through a workers' cooperative group. Indianos, as members of Las Indias are called, believe that the neoliberal policies that lead the world to its biggest crisis in history, and the financial crisis itself, originated in the inadequacy of financial capital to the reduction of optimal scale of production fueled by new technologies of the last decades of the 20th century. According to indianos' theory, the future will not be made of big industries and large supply chains, but based on commons and small scale community-developed production.

"Against the Crisis: P2P Industrial Revolution!" describes what to do today in order to start small local P2P industries based on commons, an increasingly attractive proposal in Southern Europe, where the crisis is destroying small firms that used to employ a 70% of the working population.

By any relevant metric, Chicago is an immense metropolis with tremendous global influence. Claiming 227 square miles of Illinois prairie land, Chicago was ranked the third most populous city in the United States in the 2010 U.S. Census, boasting a highly diverse, though segregated, population. The nation’s pulsating heart of culture and commerce, Chicago was named the sixth Most Influential City in the World in the 2010 A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index, (PDF) based upon business activity, human capital, information exchange, cultural experience, and political engagement, ahead of long-heralded cultural epicenters Los Angeles (ranked seventh) and San Francisco (twelth).

Most Influential Cities infographic from the December 2011 issue of National Geographic. Scan from Built in Chicago. 

Exercising outsized influence on the global stage, Chicago hosts the 2012 NATO Summit this Sunday, May 20th and Monday, May 21st, hailed by NATO Spokesperson Oana Lungescu as “the biggest NATO Summit in history.” As Occupy and other Chicago activist movements prepare protests, Chicago Police and US troops offering “logistical support” are gearing up to respond, threatening a new chapter in the city’s long (and at times brutal) history of civil disobedience.

An intense, often tempestuous, passion for civic participation is shared by Chicago’s citizens and politicians alike. The city’s notoriously aggressive political style, seemingly borrowed from the Bears’ playbook, was presided over for four (nonconsecutive) decades by the mayoral dynasty of Richard M. Daley and his son Richard J.. Daley was succeeded last year by Rahm Emanuel, the former White House Chief of Staff to President Barack Obama, whose path to the presidency began in the mid-’80s when he served as a community organizer on the city’s hyper-segregated South Side.

Chicago race/ethnicity 2010 visualization by Radical Cartography, data from 2010 U.S. Census. View larger version.

Though the city’s political and economic power is widely acknowledged, Chicago has yet to receive its due as a vibrant center of tech innovation. Over the past decade, the city has produced a number of successful web companies, including Groupon, Orbitz, Careerbuilder, Basecamp developers 37 Signals, Threadless, and Everyblock. Accelerators such as 1871, Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center, Excelerate Labs, and Technexus are kickstarting the emerging startup community, while collaborative consumption companies OhSoWe and iGo are evangelizing for the sharing economy. The open source web application frameworks Ruby on Rails (powering the likes of Twitter, Github and Hulu) and Django (Pinterest, Instagram, and the Guardian UK) hail from the city.

Recognizing Chicago’s wealth of civic-minded developers, hackers, data scientists, and journalists, Emanuel has prioritized open data and gov 2.0 initiatives since taking office. Under the leadership of Chief Technology Officer John Tolva, the city is aggressively pursuing gov 2.0 projects including the City of Chicago Data Portal, the Apps for Metro Chicago competition, and Open311, which it is developing with Code for America’s 2012 Chicago fellows.

With its diverse population, global economic and political influence, top-ranked higher education and research institutions, intense levels of civic engagement, and wide race and class disparities, Chicago is an immense laboratory for innovation, civic app development, deep data analysis, and replicable models of building community resilience. Shareable Chicago will explore the city’s significant contributions to the emerging sharing economy, and how it could serve as a model for the peer-to-peer cities of tomorrow.

Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at the re:publica event. The frame of the event was action.

This presentation was designed to inspire action.

No matter how insurmountable the problems we apparently face, I urge you to start something small today. This presentation should hopefully highlight for you how simple it can be, and what big things from small and playful experiments emerge.

When we look back we see complexity, we see the outcome and assume a plan, it's our nature. But in truth things never go to plan, one action triggers another which snowballs into a powerful movement. Waves resonate together and amplify.

Do something positive today, and see where it leads you.

Enjoy!

All too many of us are ever-eager to upgrade to the latest and greatest whatever. Whether they be computers, washing machines, or clothes, if something goes wrong or next next arrives, we're on to the next purchase.

Part of it, too, is that we don't actually know how to repair our stuff. And our world is set up so it's dramatically easier to cut and run than sit and fix. And so our landfills overflow with slightly damaged goods...a less-than-convenient truth that threatens our economic and environmental health.

This maybe changing. In The Netherlands, mom and former journalist Martine Postma stumbled onto an idea that tacks the word "repair" onto the familiar green mantra, "reduce, re-use, recycle". The result is community-based Repair Cafes where folks come together to fix their broken items. What started as a few neighbors in Amsterdam helping each other out has, two years later, become a much bigger deal with 30 groups springing up around the country.

Young girls mend items at a Repair Cafe, proving that anyone and everyone can participate. Photo credit: Repair Cafe. 

To support the regular gatherings, the Repair Cafe Foundation was established and has raised around $525,000 from the Dutch government, foundations, and individual donors. That sum covers the Foundation's staffing, marketing, and a mobile Repair Cafe. As Postma surmised, “Sustainability discussions are often about ideals, about what could be. After a certain number of workshops on how to grow your own mushrooms, people get tired. This is very hands on, very concrete. It’s about doing something together, in the here and now.”

Cradle-to-cradle architect William McDonough, whose work also inspired Postma, observed, “What happened with planned obsolescence is that it became mindless — just throw it away and don’t think about it. The value of the Repair Cafe is that people are going back into a relationship with the material things around them.”

Sharing their fixer wisdom with the community, two older gentlemen work on a lamp fixture at a Repair Cafe. Photo credit: Repair Cafe. 

That very tangible satisfaction of repairing a broken item is only one part of what the Repair Cafes offer, though. Of course, there's the environmental benefits accumulated by keeping goods in circulation. But there's also a notable community-building component to the Cafes. The DOEN Foundation contributed over $260,000 to the Repair Cafe project as part of its social cohesion program. Director Nina Tellegen explained why: “What’s interesting for us is that it creates new places for people to meet, not just live next to each other like strangers. That it’s linked to sustainability makes it even more interesting.” Singling out the benefits to elders, Tellegen noted, “They have skills that have been lost. We used to have a lot of people who worked with their hands, but our whole society has developed into something service-based.”

Similar endeavors have begun to crop up in the United States, as well. Sidling up alongside tool-lending libraries in a nice way, groups like the West Seattle Fixers Collective and the Missoula Urban Demonstration Project host DIY fix-it events and classes to help community members make needed repairs on broken items. Back at the Repair Cafe Foundation, Postma has received information requests from folks in France, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, South Africa, and Australia on how they, too, can join the fixer movement.

Inside Repair Cafe Maastricht, The Netherlands. In bike friendly Holland, it should be no surprise there' are many bikes in for repair.

The best thing about my childhood was the time I spent with friends outdoors creating our own fun...without parents around!

We waged huge mud ball wars in Summer. We played kick the can at dusk. There was the Big Wheel distance jumping contest that reduced our rides to plastic pulp. The three day Monopoloy tournament with games so long that we had to make up additional money. The fleet of model ships we destroyed in the creek during a mock naval battle. The incredibly realistic miniature village we created on creek's bank with army men, pebbles, slate, and mud. The cookie battle we waged in the parking lot of a bakery after finding a motherload of stale cookies in the dumpster out back. The epic pick up tackle football games we played inspired by NFL films. Dumpster diving for uncancelled stamps at the mail order house. The many fires we started. And the things we broke, collected, and stole.

We created and destroyed with abandon. We skinned knees, burned things, grew gardens, bloodied each others noses, built forts, collected recycled cans and made the newspaper, and created our own memories and myths with a rambunctious group of kids my brothers and I found ourselves among during 70s while living in suburban Northern Virginia.

We owned the neighborhood in one way. We knew every nook and cranny of it, and also what surrounded it. In another way we didn't. There were the older kids, bullies. They did things like make us box each other bare fisted until we bled. But they also beat the crap out of anyone outside the neighborhood that messed with us.

This was no American Academy of Pediatrics approved childhood, but I loved most this aspect of it. My life outdoors with friends was filled with true adventure. There was real discovery and danger, and that was exactly why I relished it. We had our own, separate civilization with factions, heroes, and history. I would hardly be the same person without the freedom I had to explore, screw up, imagine, and play.

I may have learned my most important lessons in that precious crucible of boyhood. I learned how to hold my own among rough and tumble peers. I learned to enlist others in creating our own reality. And I taught myself the value of rules by breaking them.

And for all the depressing turmoil at home and numbing discipline at school, it was perhaps all redeemed by the freedom I had to play in the streets and woods. These experiences are the very model of what being truly alive feels like for me, even today as an adult. 

But something has changed since I was a kid. Childhood has become shrink wrapped. It's increasingly defined by huge amounts of sedentary screen time indoors, scheduled activities controlled by adults, and fearful and competitive parents. Childhood has become a gated, private affair.

Has the play commons been enclosed? Yes, if the stats are any indication. The erosion of communal life and public space is being felt acutely by kids. They're now plagued with obesity and depression. From the new book, Playborhoods: Turn Your Neighborhood into a Place for Play:

Because children are having a lot less fun and are dealing with heightened pressure and fears from parents, far more of them are experiencing serious emotional problems. The first sign, anxiety, appears, on average, at the tender age of six. Behavior disorders start, on average, at 11, and mood disorders (primarily depression) start at 13. An incredible 22.2 percent of teens 13 to 18 suffer from mental disorders grave enough to result in "severe impairment and / or distress".

This controlled and isolated childhood is one I'd hate as a kid. And one I don't want for our two year old son Jake. Plus, I don't want to be driving him to endless scheduled activities spread across town. That's no replacement for the village it takes to raise a child. 

This situation is exactly what brought Playborhoods author and tech entrepreneur Mike Lanza to first create a playborhood for his kids, then take playborhoods to the rest of the world with a blog and book. When he started a family, he saw what was coming for his kids and said to himself, "I can't do this."

Mike then turned his home into a community center for kids and encouraged neighboring parents to do the same. The result is that their home is a magnet for neighborhood kids who are free to play unsupervised in the house or yard.

The Lanza home is quasi-public space for "free play", which psychologist believe is essential for social, cognitive, and emotional development. Free play is unstructured activity that's done for the pleasure of it rather than for reward, and it may help kids find fulfilling work based on intrinsic rewards later in life. The playborhood also brought nearby families together.

I met with Mike at a book event he held on Sunday April 29th at the playborhood he created in Menlo Park, California. Below is an interview where he explains playborhoods and how you can create one yourself.

Our visit to his playborhood left me full of wonder. Mike has radically redefined the suburban home from a display of conspicious consumption to a community center for kids. He's realized his vision to a level of detail that's awe inspiring. His playborhood demonstrates that almost every element of the home is an opportunity to educate and create a fun place for kids to play, even the driveway on which a street map of the neighborhood is painted, perfect for driving matchbox cars on.

The below slides shows the lengths he's gone. I particularly like his use of maps around the house. There's huge maps of the neighborhood, city, country, world, and even the solar system. The smaller scale maps have pictures of friends and family pinned where they live. The maps foster a sense of place and a multi-scale consciousness, which will be important for future adults in a global, networked world.

Mike's Menlo Park playborhood reflects the affluence of the area, but playborhoods are popping up in all kinds of neighborhoods. His book profiles playborhoods in tough South Bronx, the N Street cohousing community in Davis, California, a middle-class Portland neighborhood, and the new urbanism community of Pike Road, Alabama.

Playborhoods may not offer the wild boyhood I had, but perhaps it's a wholesome midpoint between total control and complete freedom. Call me a hypocrite, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea of my son Jake burning, stealing, fighting, and trespassing like we did. Maybe playborhoods can give him the freedom create his own fun without the danger? Or are playborhoods just a smarter form of parental control? Whatever the case, I'll take playborhoods over an enclosed childhood any day.

For this week's Shareable Friday video, we have our own editor Malcolm Harris on Russia Today's The Alyona Show discussing the Manhattan prosecutor's office's attempts to use his Twitter records in connection with an Occupy Wall Street arrest in October. Last time Malcolm wrote about the case for Shareable, he was fighting to intervene despite the district attorney's claim that he had no rights to his tweets. SInce then, the judge took the prosecution's side. But this week, Twitter Inc. decided to take a stand and back Malcolm's claim. Hear all about it from him below:

If Gandhi were alive today, would he use social media? He was never anti-technology, or even anti-changing with the times. Quite the opposite, actually. If Internet technologies and social networks were around, he would certainly have embraced them -- but with a conscious mindfulness of their strengths and weaknesses.

Any social-change hero succeeds in doing three fundamental things -- raising awareness, creating impact, and transforming the heart.

For awareness, the Internet has been absolutely remarkable. We have trillions of online new friendships; FaceBook releases daily numbers of how people create those friendships across conflicting religions and regions. Today's numbers: India-Pakistan: 199,721, Israel-Palestine: 39,497, Greece-Turkey: 7,988 More than half of the world’s population is now on a social networks, and it's increasing everyday; more iPhones are being produced everyday than the number of people being born. If FaceBook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. And this whole online world is filled with generative altruism. An hour of video is uploaded every second -- and collectively, we are generating more content in 5 years than we did from the beginning of time to 2003. Over 68 million users share and like content everyday. If Wikipedia were a book, it would be 2.25 million pages long; all for free, with more than 100 million volunteer hours donated on Wikipedia alone. All of this makes for an incredible platform for spreading ideas and content, with very little overhead.

For social impact, the use of the Internet has been mixed. We don't need to go further than the Arab Spring to see its remarkable potential. However, it has also created many new problems, ranging from cyber-bullying to "slacktivism" to reducing our attention spans. The jury is still out on where the balance will ultimately calibrate itself, but thus far, it seems to tip in the direction of net positive social impact. Yesterday was February 14th, and I was reminded of a Valentine’s Day campaign in India, back in 2009 -- Pink Chaddi Campaign. In a small town in South India, a group of conservative community members decided to physically assault women who went to bars. A pretty savage response, by any account. People were infuriated but due to the corruption in the political sphere, nothing was being done. So a bunch of sympathizers from around the world decided to get active. They started a FaceBook group and requested everyone to send "pink underwear" to government officials. It spread like wildfire. That small city's government officials started receiving hundreds and hundreds of pink underwear. Not just on Valentine’s Day, but it continued everyday. They really didn't know how to respond. The underwear kept coming and coming. Until finally, they took action and jailed the attackers who were harassing the women. It became a landmark case about the efficacy of grassroots online campaigns, powered by the strength of distributed connections.

The Internet, then, is great for spreading awareness and it can be quite powerful in terms of its impact as well. Where it lacks, though, is the third element -- transformation.

Online friendships can only go so far. There are 75 million more farmers on Farmville than in the real world. Farmville is not farming, just as online ties aren’t equivalent to “real life” friendships. By itself, online friendships are fairly weak. Back in 2008, a NY Times journalist wrote an article about how amazed he was that he had 700 friends; so he threw a party in the hopes that everyone could get to know each other. One person showed up, and that too, by accident. FaceBook's organizing principle is to retain the online attention of its users and monetize it by displaying ads; this is why they are going to IPO for 75 billion dollars. Clearly, online social networks are providing a valuable utility in our world, but they are also systemically limited. By design, FaceBook would rather have you send an online teddy bear to a friend than to go off their network and give a hug. Nothing against online teddy bears, but it can't replace a hug. :) Science tells us that oxytocin is released in our brains when we interact with others in an altruistic way -- it makes us feel good, improves our health, and increases our sense of well being.

If mirroring such experiences online dilutes the inner transformation, what kind of questions do we need to be asking? What if the optimal solution is a hybrid that couples the Internet’s global connectivity with the oxytocin of a local friendship? Dot-coms won’t be asking that question since they are only incentivized towards online progress; traditional organizations typically aren’t in position to explore that inquiry since they’re not on the cutting edge of technological evolution. Who will ask those questions? We don’t know yet, but we need to be asking them.

If we consider the profound revolutionaries of our time, from Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez to Mother Teresa, Dalai Lama, and Aung San Suu Kyi -- the hallmark of their leadership wasn't just their awareness or the impact of their campaigns. Many other strategists might have done better; their strength was in their own inner transformation, which empowered them to touch the hearts of their communities. It's valuable to watch a video on how cigarettes can harm your body; that's awareness. It's valuable to enroll in a program that gives you nicotine patches to get off smoking; that's impact. What transformation does is shift the pattern of addiction altogether; changing the habits of your heart was the true genius of these social change giants.

Basketball players will often score a basket, get fouled and yell "And one!" if they get a chance to score that third point. This is the third point. Activism -- and one!

If we are to have sustainable revolutions that last for generations, our modern day technologies have to be designed for this element of inner transformation. Each of those legendary service heroes started with changing themselves at the root level, and despite leading vast revolutions, always kept that front and center. Similarly, when we engage at the cusp of our own evolution, we can't help but broaden from self orientation to other orientation. We then serve from a place of abundance, which means we serve with joy and gratitude. We honor our profound interconnection and, as we align with a natural unfolding that is greater than us, we continue to transform ourselves. External change that comes from this kind of positive feedback loop is fundamentally different.

When organized, such inner-transformation driven designs work at the intersection of three big circles: outer change, systemic change and personal change. Activism is often defined at the intersection of outer change and systemic change, but it is incomplete without the element of our own internal transformation. Its such a critical idea, but yet we don't have a word for it. So we made up our own word.

Giftivism: the practice of radically generous acts that change the world. It works by transforming the heart of the change maker, even more than the impact on its external beneficiaries. A key metric of giftivism is that it works to uplift the 100%. It has no enemies. It is unconditionally kind to everyone. Gandhi used to call it Sarvodaya -- welfare of all. It isn’t a new idea, it isn’t copyrighted nor will it ever IPO. “It's as old as the hills,” Gandhi used to say.

When Gandhi was about 70 years old, he was giving a talk to several thousand people in the small city of Rajkot. In between the talk, a gang of 600 "bandits" disrupted the gathering to wage a violent attack on the listeners. People didn't know what to do. On one hand, they were listening to an apostle of nonviolence and on the other hand there were these bandits who wanted to dominate through violence. Chaos ensued everywhere. People were seriously hurt; ambulance and police sirens were ringing loudly. In the middle of all this, Gandhi was still up on stage; he closed his eyes and started praying and meditating; his face was completely serene but his body was convulsing, potentially from the negativity of the scene. When he opened his eyes, he informed the organizers that he wanted to speak to the leader of the bandits. Confusion arose since many were afraid to expose Gandhi to the violence; but Gandhi not only insisted, but chose to meet with him by himself. The organizers panicked as Gandhi proceeded to meet the gang leader. 26-year-old Bal Kalelkar was witness to this exchange and later wrote: "To everyone's amazement the thugs' violence melted like ice. The leader of the gang stood before Gandhi-ji with folded hands ... That evening he walked all the way home with one hand on the shoulder of the leader of the gang."

That's the power of inner transformation. That's giftvism.

Today, social media and Internet technologies are amazing assets for all of us. Gandhi would certainly have embraced them. But their designs have to be rooted in the place of our greatest leverage -- inner transformation. We have to ensure that all our technologies continue to report to our collective humanity and not the other way around.

Last year I drew a comic for the Shareable book Share or Die, chronicling some of the emotional turmoil of applying and getting rejected from PhD programs, and my conclusion that I should stop waiting for permission or credentials to do the work I love. Since then, I have had many conversations with many people at a similar standstill, trying to figure out how to carve a path for themselves in the new precariat reality, trying to do what they love and stay true to themselves while still paying the bills. In particular, I've been able to speak to many past, current, future, and prospective graduate students grappling with the desire to engage in academic research and to teach on a college level, in an economy where academic jobs are few and far between and our universities are in crisis. I think, despite its many and deep flaws, the university still represents a unique site of opportunity and resources for scholarship and learning, and despite my concerns, I decided to apply again. Perhaps because of the work I've done "without permission," I fared better this round and will be heading to grad school in the fall.

Wish me luck?

• New York's new bike-sharing program is making a big splash, not least of all because of its name: Citibike. As in Citibank. As in the bank a lot of folks who would be possible bike-sharers can't stand. We'll see how this goes.
   
• If your city hasn't had their own major article by now about the rise of collaborative consumption and its effects in the community, then you must live not in a major US city. Portland joins the list.
   
• A wedding contest is making broad use of collaborative consumption services as prizes, could this be the new kind of prize? It could be one that doesn't involve making a lot of stuff that'll end up in the garbage?
   
• Charles Green at Forbes takes a look at collaborative consumption and trust online and wonders, "Wouldn’t it be great, the thinking goes, if we could come up with the equivalent of a FICO credit score for would-be trustees?"
   
• And in a less high-tech mode of reusing, these pictures from Kenya show how to sew old sweatshirt sleeves into pants for toddlers.
   
• In Amsterdam, groups of people gather around a table, but not to consume. Instead, they fix things that just don't quite work right.
   
• Shareable friend Caroline Woolard talked to Hyper Allergic about alternative economies and the network OurGoods.

It might seem a little risky to lend out a bunch of power tools to those who probably don’t know how to use them. After all, tools can be dangerous, people can be idiots, and we live in an exceptionally litigious society. For some strange but very understandable reason, those concerns alone have been more than enough to effectively end many community tool libraries before they even start. 

As the sharing economy continues to blossom, however, more communities are overcoming that inherent fear and establishing lending libraries to embrace the beautiful benefits of sharing with neighbors. Through Google groups, starter kits, and incubator workshops, new tool libraries now have the ability to overcome their inherent concerns by learning from the experiences of many who have come before them.

Though it seems like a relatively unique idea, around 40 community tool libraries already exist throughout the United States, from Philadelphia to Seattle and south to Oakland and New Orleans. Each has its own unique flavor but most operate roughly the same way by accepting tool donations from the community and then lending those tools out for free—or nearly free—to anyone capable of presenting an ID and signing a waiver. Through that basic setup, some tool libraries have been happily participating in the sharing economy for over 20 years. 

While most tool libraries are more than willing to share whatever they’ve learned, a handful of libraries have recently led the charge towards making it increasingly easy for even the most cautious and underfunded communities to take up the challenge. Strangely enough, these libraries happen to be some of the youngest.

Michael Froehlich, for example, felt compelled to establish a National Tool Library Google Group a couple years ago, just after founding The West Philly Tool Library. By creating a space for common questions and answers, he hoped to not only provide greater access to lessons learned but also to manage the barrage of inquiries he was receiving.

"Almost immediately after opening our tool library, we were getting 3 to 5 requests per month for advice from others who also wanted to start tool libraries," says Froehlich. "So many people had helped us get started, we certainly weren't going to ignore their requests. But we wanted to figure out an easier, more efficient way for people interested in getting started to tap into the wealth of information from tool libraries across the country."

In like fashion, the founders of The West Seattle Tool Library, myself included, also felt compelled to share everything we were learning in the planning and management of our own tool library. Since the first day we starting planning the project, our hope was to develop The West Seattle Tool Library into an easily replicable model for any individuals and organizations interested in starting their own version. 

“The biggest reward for me is being a part of the amazing community of tool libraries, as well as all the makers, fixers, artisans, and neighbor s who use them,” says Gene Homicki, one of The West Seattle Tool Library’s founders, “I wanted to encourage that community’s growth by making sure that everyone who is interested in tool libraries has access to all the resources they needed.”

With that in mind, The West Seattle Tool Library set about creating a tool library starter kit. Our hope was that this kit would effectively comfort the worrisome souls who were either intimidated by the numerous details of the planning process or quite appropriately concerned about safety, liability, and security. The result of those efforts recently became its very own project, Share Starter, which has now hosted a handful of tool library incubator sessions as well as developed a free starter kit.

While inquiries on starting a tool library come from far and wide, The West Seattle Tool Library and Share Starter also constantly receive a large number of requests from our own region. By hosting local Incubators, we’ve actually been able to address those inquiries and efficiently share our knowledge in small, personal sessions with anyone in driving distance. 

“The incubators really inspired us to get started on our own tool library,” says Susan Gregory of the newly-forming Northeast Seattle Tool Library, “We got good nuts and bolts information on how they organized their tool library, we were offered excellent support as we got up and running, and we were inspired by the success West Settle has had so far. Having a successful model to emulate has helped us to procure a space to use, has given us an example to reference when people are unsure of what we're attempting to do, and hopefully will help us attain funding for our project.” 

Partly as a result of the incubators, there are currently six other tool library projects underway just in Seattle alone and a handful more starting up throughout our region. The starter kit—including liability and membership forms, tool use policies, sample work plans, budgets, letters of support, and fiscal sponsor agreements—will hopefully allow all of these organizations to overcome the burdens and worries of moving their concepts on to the next stage.

Considering all the obvious benefits that tool libraries offer, from encouraging neighborhood development to serving as a great foundation for the sharing economy, it’s rather a shame that there isn’t one in every neighborhood. Through the efforts of a growing tool library community, though, that situation seems to be changing rapidly. With all the resources now out there to tap into, and all the established tool libraries calming the fears, it’s quite possible that everyone will soon have a tool library just down the street. If that doesn’t automatically happen where you live, perhaps all these resources will at least give you the confidence to start building one of your own…and then share what you learn.

Hayes Valley Farm and the Bay Area Community Exchange (BACE) Timebank are hosting an urban Homestead Skillshare Festival on Saturday, May 26, 2012 in San Francisco. The festival will share sustainable living and self-sufficiency skills, with an emphasis on reaching low-income people and youth. The organizers are using timebank hours to create the festival and attendees have the option to pay with dollars or timebank hours.

The two-dozen workshop topics include: bike machines, solar ovens, composting, urban gardening, DIY green cleaning, wine-making, bee-keeping, backyard livestock, candle-making and more. There will also be music, food, and Spanish translation at the event.

Sign up on the Festival's Eventbrite page.

Shareable is a media sponsor of this event.

Good green marketers push the innovation of different products. Better products. But can we profit from making less products in the first place? “Swap Don’t Shop,” the most recent of the Columbia Business School Alumni Club’s Making Green from Green events, explored this very dilemma.

The panel began with a sobering point. Moderator Cameron Tonkinwise of the Parsons School of Design Strategies reminded his audience of green business advocates that for all the sustainable sourcing, the holistic manufacturing, the reusable materials, and whatever else constitutes our so-called green products, efficiencies are cancelled out the moment we manage to sell a greater quantity of those products.

If, however, we use our efficient products within business models that require fewer of them to be in circulation, we’ll most certainly reduce waste. The real question, then, is whether there’s money to be made in doing so.

The “Swap Don’t Shop” panelists – all entrepreneurs within the “sharing economy” predicted to reach $110 billion in value – answered this question with a resounding yes.

Take Carpooling.com, for instance. The company’s International Senior Product Manager Odile Beniflah explained how the tremendous demand for this car-sharing service has grown to two million users a month across 45 countries. She’s now preparing for their launch in the U.S., where the average car is used merely one hour per day while having 3-5 empty seats.

“The greatest public transportation infrastructure we have is the empty seats on the road,” Beniflah explained.

This correlation between wasted materials and wasted money was a common theme throughout the panel discussion. When products aren’t being used to their fullest capacity, or when they could be resold on a secondary market, why not take advantage of these unrealized opportunities for profit?

This is the goal of “mesh” companies, or those companies that use websites and social media to convert a product need into a service offering, therefore extending the life and use of each product while removing the need for consumer ownership.

A mesh company can even avoid holding inventory altogether by facilitating peer-to-peer product trading, as demonstrated by the “Swap Don’t Shop” panelists. Carpooling.com enables people to advertise empty seats in their personal vehicles. Snap Goods uses an innovative tool to help people find the members of their own social networks most likely to trade certain goods with them. Similarly, Closet Raid helps people sell, swap, or give away products to their own social media contacts. Key WiFi helps people rent their Internet connection to those who can’t afford to be connected in hopes of fostering a more efficiently connected society.

But while the supply of “sharing economy” services often thrives on ecologically minded entrepreneurs, it seems the demand for those shared goods is usually motivated by a different sort of green. According to the panelists, their services are marketed first and foremost as ways of saving money – not ways of avoiding excess waste.

Such indirect messaging isn’t a new idea. Green marketing expert and CBSAC committee member Jacquelyn Ottman cleverly brought the industry’s attention to this fundamental principle in her latest book, The New Rules of Green Marketing. When branding sustainable products or services, core messaging must appeal to consumers’ self-interests. By underscoring the primary benefits most relevant to that item’s function (such as how car sharing saves you money or how responsibly manufactured clothing makes you look good), you establish your brand as more of a need than an idealistic want.

Most importantly, this subtle approach broadens your target market. It was this latter rationale panelists emphasized the most. For a sharing economy to expand and prevail, after all, the philosophy must pervade mainstream consumer groups. In the same respect, it must pervade mainstream companies . Try telling brands that incorporating sharing services into their business model could lower costs, broaden their target markets, and extend the profit-making capacity of every product involved, and you might drive greater change than you would with environmental guilt appeals.

But in the end, it won’t matter if companies actually like product sharing; they’ll have to live with it. That’s why General Motors and Ford invested in peer-to-peer car sharing companies this year, and it’s why major auto manufacturers in Germany, such as Volkswagen, recently launched car-sharing programs. Ironically, it’s possible that companies investing wisely in sharing could face more opportunity than risk. Car-sharing revenues in North America, for example, will hit $3.3 billion by 2016 according to Gartner Group researchers.

Overall, it seems possible for a healthy national sharing economy to yield many macroeconomic benefits. Sharing services could create countless jobs for entrepreneurs. Sharing options could open up niche or expensive products to much wider consumer markets. Sharing frameworks adopted by manufacturers could extend the money-making capacity of their products without requiring additional production costs. Just imagine a major manufacturer or retailer that is the producer or designer of products – and the facilitator of sharing services for those products.

While ownership and one-time-use will never become obsolete, scarce resources will dictate that they become less frequent in most product categories. For this reason, sharing may very well be the 21st century’s miracle fuel in that it is nearly immune to ecological constraints. After all the efficiencies gained from the Industrial Age and the Information Age, the greatest efficiencies of all may be yet to come in the Sharing Age.

All of this brings to mind the saying so cleverly recalled by Key WiFi founder and CEO Adam Black. “Cavemen didn’t stop building with stone because they ran out. They stopped because they found better materials.”

We have plenty of materials… for now. Only thinking about now, though, has never made anyone rich or famous. Will cooperative networks power our future?

Coworking spaces can be a lot of different things depending on where they are and the community they exist to serve. Some are startup incubators or event centers, while others are hubs for all types of sharing. Some coworking spaces are free, though most charge monthly membership fees. 

No matter what shape or size, the mission of most coworking spaces is the same: to facilitate collaboration and success among a community of talented people who believe they are better when working in close proximity with their peers.

What's funny is that coworking spaces sometimes forget to excercise this mantra of openess and sharing when formulating their own business plan. As coworking becomes more popular, multiple spaces may crop up in the same town, neighborhood, or maybe even on the same street. Owners and community managers sometimes view these newcomers as competition, their constant questions an annoyance. It's natural to want to "protect one's turf," after all, most space owners gained success through a hard process of trial and error. But these reservations just don't make sense for a style of work based on tearing down walls and collaborating with those around you.

At the 2012 Global Coworking Unconference Conference I had the pleasure of sitting in on a discussion about the value of regional coworking alliances. Over the past few years, we've seen coworking spaces band together to provide mutual support, host events, or provide additional benefits for members. 

One statement by a coworking space owner seemed to resonate with the group. He pointed out that coworking spaces don't need to view each other as competitors. Their biggest competition is the home office, the executive suite, and the coffee shop. Working together to educate the community about the benefits of collaborative work is the best way for all coworking spaces to grow and prosper.

The Seattle Collaborative Space Alliance is a great example of what can happen when people stop competing and join forces instead. Formerly known as Coworking Seattle, the group consists of a handful of volunteers from Office Nomads, The Maple Leaf Branch, Coworking Eastlake, The Mill, Makers, CivicActions, and Jigsaw Renaissance. The name change came about because the group also wanted to embrace maker, hacker, artist or any group that may share the same core concept of collaboration within a shared space.

Participants provide a support system for new owners, collaborate on events that encourage socialization between members of different spaces, and share the responsibility of educating Seattleites about the world of coworking.

"I found out about the Seattle group and knew I had to participate, so I plugged in right away," said Ryan Murphy of Coworking Eastlake. "I wanted to learn and understand what I was already getting myself into, I wanted to feel out how this group interacted without being competitive, and lastly I didn’t want to miss out on any opportunities or potential benefits the group might be able to provide my space."

The group has developed in a very organic, low-pressure way, but they do have some goals they'd like to achieve as a family of spaces.

"We are looking at 3 primary areas: Supporting folks who want to open, or have just opened, a collaborative space in the area; assisting members of existing spaces with worthwhile projects; and helping spaces invest in tools and projects that will further the culture of collaborative consumption as a whole," said Chelsea McClain, a volunteer from Office Nomads. "We are still figuring out what kind of help we will offer but funding and organizational support are definitely part of the picture."

Are you an established coworking space owner wondering how to take your community to the next level? Are you tired of having to answer the same "what's coworking?" question for everyone you meet? Are you new to the world of coworking, and looking for a way to connect with and learn from the larger community?

A regional coworking alliance might be for you!

Here's some advice from Seattle for those who might like to start or join a coworking alliance in their area:

1. Free Your Mind, And Collaboration Will Follow

Letting go of the idea that other businesses with a similar model are your competition can be difficult, but it's necessary to access to power of collaboration that makes coworking such an attractive alternative.

"...the future is not in competing with each other, it’s in collaborating with each other the exact same way that you encourage your members to collaborate with each other," says Murphy. "Think about it...what additional opportunities to share events, resources and networking appear when you shed the boundaries of your walls the same way you encourage your coworking members to shed the boundaries of their cubicles? If you isolate yourself from a collective of coworking spaces, you are isolating your members as well. As a coworker, would you rather join a space that was involved in the movement and gave you additional opportunities to collaborate with a wider network of people, or a space that saw all other spaces as competition, leading to a culture of isolation and ego (“our space is superior to theirs, our members are better, we have a better mission, etc. etc.”)?

2. Stop, Drop, and Organize

Hanging out and chatting is fun, but that's not going to get much accomplished. Talk with other coworking spaces about the best way to structure regular meetings so that time will be spent working toward and achieving goals set by the group. Meetup and a Google Group were two tools that helped the Seattle spaces used to find interested participants, schedule meetings, identify goals, and discuss issues, and since they're free, these tools could work for your collective as well. Then devise a plan for how to stay on tract when you get together. "We meet for the first hour with structure, and the 2nd hour as social, so we still keep an element of open discussion while also being able to add the necessary structure we were lacking before. It also keeps the momentum we had for anyone to show up and participate instead of only the same board members each time," says Murphy.

3. Defend Against The Idea Machine

This may sound counterintuitive in the coworking environment, but the job of an organization like this is to set focused goals based only on what matters most to the organization, and ACHIEVING THEM. Most people come to meetings full of ideas. But what's really important to the owners, members, and larger community? What will help spread the word about coworking while helping individual members to be more successful, productive, and happy?

"You can throw the spaghetti of ideas against the wall when you are coming up with your top priorities, but afterwards, defend against idea spam that may take you off course until you have achieved your top priorities and are ready to refresh your priority list," advises Murphy.

4. Talk To Each Other

Remember that you're all on the same team, and actively cultivate a sense of community between spaces. "There are enough folks looking for coworking space and enough variety between spaces that there's room for everyone," points out McClain. "We have to remember to work collaboratively between spaces as well as within them. For example, whenever we hear about a new space in Seattle, we reach out to them, welcome them and try to visit to show our support. They don't all want to participate to the same degree, but I think it really helps to set a supportive tone right off the bat. We also send each other leads and recommend other spaces to members who are looking for something other than what Office Nomads offers."

5. Share Your Smarts

This whole sharing/collaborating/community building thing doesn't work unless people show up. Participate for the sake of participating. If you are unsure of the value you will get, try to have faith and allow yourself to believe that it will be worthwhile.

"Participating helped me understand better what the coworking movement was all about, which in turn helped me understand my own business and space a little better," said Murphy. "I was able to ask probing questions and see other space set ups to help me figure out my own thought process and decisions. I had a lot of questions, but as I did my own research and exploration, I found that I started coming up with some answers that I could also contribute back."

Bonus! Get online.

Some would argue that if you're not online, you're nowhere. The Seattle group purchased the domain www.collaborativespaces.org, but then started thinking that it’s possible other cities/areas may want to utilize the same concept. So, in the true spirit of sharing, they'll be moving their site to a sub-domain (seattle.collaborativespaces.org) and allow other groups to utilize a collaborative spaces sub-domain for their region, if they want. "We don’t know yet exactly where this will lead," says Murphy, "but anyone interested can inquire at info@collaborativespaces.org."

Has your coworking space made an effort to collaborate with other businesses or organizations in the area? Tell us about it in the comments!